Tag: sadness

The city is a pretty great place, if you want to do coke on the shelf of a bathroom stall that is, or talk to the homeless tell you a deeply troubling story about the time he was molested when he was twelve. Like… I didn’t really try hard for insane things to happen in my life they just sort of did.

I hate saying this but I get a little anxious at the thought of seeing old faces from a life I don’t recognize anymore. I was at a train station and ran into an old roommate, I didn’t even recognise him, even though just months earlier his pet snake had gotten out and had been living under my bed for several weeks without my knowledge. Yeah that was a pretty scary discovery. I didn’t know what to say to him, I asked after the snake, George and got a smile and some throwaway reply. Despite the fact we boarded the same train we didn’t continue to talk, we even sat two seats apart but we just let that awkward silence settled on the both of us. I guess we had both silently agreed that the end of our relationship in any form was the best for the both of us. I think in that moment, that moment when we knew we would never speak again, by choice or accident, that I understood him more than I ever had before.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot, the power of leaving. A website I used to frequent recently closed its doors for good and it felt like a nice closing chapter for me. I don’t like being depended on much, relationships, especially romantic ones make me uncomfortable. I’m not sure if I can sustain anyone I have, it’s something that sits and rattles in my head like ”is this actually healthy for me?”. I think I might have another one of those moments soon, those mutual glances when we acknowledge this is the bridge and it’s burning and we’re not fighting to save it. Maybe in that moment, stripped down of all artifice, all assumptions and ideas of grandeur or perceived good, when you really see a person tear out your heart, then and only then will you really know them, every inch. You’ll wonder too in that moment if you convinced yourself that they were never this person before, but in truth you know, you both were just going through the motions. The fancy dress facade you use when you want someone to love you. When you want someone to be something and make you something to.

I had a bad moment in my life when I treated a series of people really badly, I was working through some fucked up shit and this resulted in a really aggressive series of bad entanglements. In a way though I was kind of okay with being the bastard at the time, because being the bastard is easy right? It makes you unaccountable. If you’re the asshole, you don’t have to live up to any standards cause obviously you’re the asshole and you’ve always been the asshole. I’ve had people tell me I’m the best person they know, or stupid shit like, I’m the most important thing in their life… In truth I cringe a little when I hear those things, I feel so disconnected from those words. From those feelings. Maybe I do have a dissociative disorder or something. Sometimes I see things and I think things, I get overwhelmed by the idea that I’m different. That I’m just not the same I can’t function like others. I know it’s arrogant to assume these feelings of, well… Not belonging are unique to me, I know they’re not. It’s just hard to have that perspective in the moment though.

I guess it comes down to fear right? That’s what it has to be? I have this special nervousness attached to questions pertaining to how I am or what I’ve done. I’m turning 22 soon. Just a couple of days now. Maybe I’ll feel something then, but right now I just can’t sleep. I’m staring at the ceiling thinking of people I haven’t seen in years, reliving moments so strongly my chest tightens. I can’t help but wonder in the darkness then, if they too, wherever they are share those same memories, those same thoughts. I don’t know if it’s comforting, or even…. Uncomforting to know either way. Maybe I’m the crazy one who just can’t grow up, leave my mistakes behind.

I have no answers if I’m doing the right thing, if I’m being the best person I can or if I’m just floundering in the darkness, trying to grasp onto something that explains my unraveled mess of a psyche. I don’t really know how to end this, I don’t really how to move on, change my mind set and come back to being… Happy…

Maybe this year, the oldest and the youngest I’ll ever, ever be will be the turning point. The moment when it makes sense. I think I need that hope to hold onto right now.

If you’re out there, thinking, feeling something for someone, maybe you too have your own little person thinking back about you, writing some dribble on a blog post because they can’t sleep.

My Mother had three boys between two different men, all of whom have nothing to do with her or their offspring. Elaborate tales of why spun across dining tables, as if the why’s matter and they bring comfort. Because really there’s no reason why things happen, they just do, but it’s a reality we hide from children. Like they should be privileged to live in this frame where rhymes make a rhythm. All this fancying, this bone breaking theater leaves us with, is not some optimistic vision of the world, our future, our place in the universe spiritually or materialistically, but an aching hole and hunger, a wound dying to go back to that time, that lie that seemed so real.

I’ve been alone most of my life, unable to connect to the many colors of my family. The first a neurotic mess crippled by a perceived wrong, addled with aggression and a an abrasive sense of justness. The second an unperturbed liar, a narcissistic capable of hurting so easily; and the worst, the last one thrown out, a flavorless fuck incapable and lame. Vile and hurtful. Not even aware enough to describe themselves as anything more than a pitiful excuse for a person.

I grew up confused and I sometimes day-dream about my death. Who would mourn for me, pour water on my grave, breath heat into the soil? It’s a small list and gets smaller still. I try to imagine when my bones will be bleached and if anyone will write for me. Will anyone love me then.

That day, the heat was terrible, but I perched under that tree, scared of what I might find. A terrible fear that I didn’t know what to do with. I was bad to that dog. I hardly ever took her out, forgot about her, didn’t stroke her enough share with her… Now she was sentenced to death, and all I was faced with was the miserable things I had failed at. Not a good memory in sight, and I wonder if she knew that…

I didn’t want to look at death, at suicide, because I imagined that I, through action or inaction had helped those seeds grow and those wounds fester…

Or maybe it was the powerless feeling that unsettled me so much, a lack of confidence to change the world. A time where those lies I had as a child would be so handy. Where I could spin yarns like my mother and brothers did, lies about how things are, and why they happen. Feed that wound, not only in someone, but in myself. Was it easy to do? I don’t even remember it, maybe no one does, maybe it’s natural, inert in us to sooth like that, with fiction, but it never does sooth, it only furthers that extension.

The strain she has. I can’t reach around it, not with words, only with my arms. I want to feel the re-verb of her chest open and close. I want her to feel me dying with her… I just… Want her not to hurt anymore.

An overdose of anesthetic, it seemed so easy. A cardiac arrest and complete failure of the respiratory system seizes the body. . Her paw, listlessly hangs off the table. it’s movement, not governed by the force of her body, her might and muscle, but by the force of gravity. The line break between life and death. The snap of the fingers, that warns you she’s dead; and it awakens a primal, cave like fear. A want to leave it, images of carcass I’ve seen on the shore. rotten and eaten sheep. Bloated ribcages exploded and open. the gases once inside having grown and burst, popping the body like a balloon.

I picture my hands, as I lifted myself off her plunging into her rotted rib-cage, getting stuck on the bones and congealing blood…

yet the worst part, was that I left her there, on that gaudy stainless steel frame with a rubberized black top that’s convenient to clean. It’s such a fucking indignity, it offends me to see that, her paw so, dead. Her eyes sit open but they are still, she’s dead. I tried, before I left, to…

Put her paw back, to leave her in a more, peaceful position, as if it matter, but every time, it flopped back, and with each attempt, I grew just a more numb until it didn’t even matter any more.

She was dead. When A second ago she was driven by this urge to exist. The cells inside her dividing and copying themselves, growing and living and mutating. The urge to live, the divinity of self-interest. Matters to us all, matters to me, but when this dog, this unloved dog died on that table, me clutching her shaking form was I respecting that?

Yet I still ask the woman I love, who wants to die, to live. I lie and say I showed that dog a mercy, when It wanted to live and to live with, a cruel joke.

I held that body.

That dog of matted hair, stinking the way she always stank, hair coming away with me, playing in my fingers on the drive home. The wound in my stomach growing till the point of vomit.

When I held that dog on that table, that awful terrible table, I imagined you in your coffin. Me, being unable to love you. A stranger to your family, a stranger to your husband, a gritted eulogy, where I would introduce myself as a colleague, unable to say the things I could never say again. The threads of me that bleed into you severed, broken nerves that would never heal or leave. A brain too dumb to recognize their deadness, always sending signals to those frayed corners going nowhere. To big, to colorful and hungry to let anything else grow. And to you, that you would leave without me, perhaps I am not intended to see. To know of… Yet my whole being just wants it, to hold you all the time, and when I picture your body that urge is so painful, so sharp.

I held a dead body that day, I didn’t want to hold yours, not because I wouldn’t, because I would, I’d’ never let go, but I wouldn’t want to live in a world without you.

I wish I had, some profound point to leave, some moment of clarity when it clicks and makes sense, but that would be another lie for another child. Because there isn’t one.

It’s you and me, our lives, our memories, our moments. Each second passing irretrievable. I say that I love you, because I know that each second that does pass with you, I don’t want to retrieve, I want to preserve.